The undead corpse of @dogearnation, rising again as new Games at Work podcast! bit.ly/AtPY2Z Braaains... I mean: Gaaaames!

—
Mikael Haglund (@0xdeadbeef) January 15, 2012

I’ve  been podcasting fairly regularly for the past few years, primarily with my good friends Michael Martine and Michael Rowe over in Durham, NC on a weekly show called Dogear Nation.

As I’ve travelled more, and as we’ve all got more busy, it became harder to keep that momentum up. I know I, for one, was tired and looking for some fresh inspiration. When we reached episode 200 last year, we announced a hiatus.

This year, we’re starting to ramp up something new. Same presenters, different format – going back to basics, if you will. Probably not weekly, more likely every two weeks… but continuing to explore some of the themes we’d been looking at around how gaming technology and concepts can influence business, work and productivity.

We’re still working on branding etc but you can grab the first episode of Games at Work right now via the existing site. We’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

These are misconceived and threatening to the free and open operation of the Internet – and they have far-reaching implications that go far beyond the shores of the United States (got to love asymmetric extradition…). They need to be stopped.

One of my earliest memories is of kneeling on the floor at the back of my bedroom making LEGO cars – it was in version 1.0 of my bedroom as I grew up, before new furniture and decoration. I must have been about 4, or 5. I had a castle, knights, some space stuff including base boards with little moulded “craters”… lots of fun as a child.

When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

I’d long known that many of my friends and colleagues have remained huge LEGO fans (Cerys has just blogged about her interest; Ben made some fun timelapse videos of building his Christmas present). For me, a key moment was Roo‘s 3 minute masterpiece of a paean to the medium at Interesting in 2008, embedded here for your enjoyment. Listen to the audio slidecast – closest you can get to having been there, and Roo did a wonderful (and amusing!) job.

Also, a memorable talk at the CRIM Crystal Ball Conference in Montreal in April 2010 (at which I also spoke) came from then Professor of Innovation at LEGO Group, David Robertson – a tale of Rebuilding LEGO, and how the company had saved itself from bankruptcy by refocusing on its core values and customer needs. It was a fantastic story and I was rapt.

More recently, I went along to the Internet of Things meetup in London last month, and was delighted to see Ken “monsonite” Boak – creator of the Nanode, a fantastic UK-grown prototyping platform akin to Arduino – use LEGO as his metaphor for a talk exploring Open Source electronics. Ken was kind enough to pop his slides up on Slideshare today, so you can take a look. He’d just been out to get some LEGO the previous weekend…

I want some LEGO. I own a single minifig. This is not good enough. Where can I get LEGO in Guildford.

—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) January 14, 2012

That talk was more-or-less the moment when I realised – I needed some LEGO. I wanted some. Both as a way of seeing where things had gone to, and to help me to prototype things, and just… well… just because! I’d already started to use dioramas featuring minifigs in a couple of presentations recently and had good feedback, so I figured that was another excuse

So, on Saturday I decided to dip back into my passion for LEGO. It started with a bucket of bricks from the nearest toy shop… but then I noticed the LEGO Star Wars sets with slight discounts[1]… and I figured well, obviously I’d need some wheels of some kind so picked up some City sets… and some of the foil-bag Minifigures…

The splurge quickly developed into a binge via a @darachennis-inspired trip to the LEGO store in Westfield White City on Sunday… picking-and-mixing bricks from the back wall, and signing up for the VIP program. There may be no hope left for me…

So what have I learned?

• Minifigs are brilliant. The aforementioned David Robertson gave me his business card, his details printed on a minifig resembling him, in Montreal in 2010 and that reawakened my interest. When I was a kid they all had the same pair of staring eyes and identical pleasant non-threatening smile, but the range of looks and expressions now available make them as much fun to customise as the full sets.
• People talk about the beauty of Apple’s designs – both inside and outside of the product (not that I’ve ever cracked open an iPhone to look inside). LEGO is blocky and “harsh”… but the designs and assembly process is beautiful. Assembling little cars and other sets on Saturday evening, following simple pictorial instructions, I realised that every piece had a place and it all fitted together wonderfully, perfectly. That (re)discovery had me as delighted as an adult, with a more architectural and design-oriented brain, as I was as a kid with the sheer enjoyment of being able to build and modify things.
• In my opinion, all kids should be given some LEGO, and allowed to build the models from the boxes themselves (much though I’m sure as an involved adult I’d be itching to take over!). I’ve blogged recently about my excitement for the maker culture, and this is really where it can all begin.
• I need to keep an eye on my bank balance, and a check on my excitement. I love it, but I bought it for “professional” reasons…

"children don't need to spend a year learning PowerPoint, and get a GSCE for it... They need digital Meccano" @ian_livingstone #futureteched

—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) January 12, 2012

Last week, the UK Government announced that ICT courses would be replaced with Computer Science, including a programming element (one of the campaigns I’ve been passionate about). At an event from The Education Foundation in London the next day – The Future of Technology Education – I was privileged to hear one of my personal heroes Ian Livingstone (of Fighting Fantasy books, Games Workshop and Eidos fame) speak and refer to “digital Meccano” – and I owned Meccano as a child too.  He also highlighted the need to combine science and art to push the digital boundaries.

Here’s what I think: we should be giving children a choice of physical LEGO, Meccano, and other toys; encouraging their creativity and building skills; and helping them to bridge between both the digital and physical worlds. No child should be excluded, and none should be pushed down a particular path. We should be supporting and helping every child to discover their passions and explore them; recognising that not every individual will want to program, or draw, paint, build, or write – but never belitting anyone for their talents or interests.

I’ve rarely been as excited about the future than I have been right now!

[1] as a child in in the 1980s I owned significant numbers of the Palitoy Star Wars figures and vehicles[2]. Whoever thought of combining LEGO and Star Wars is a genius – so much MORE FUN than the original, inflexible, non-customisable toys. So much more interactive, and through the video games, adding a humorous new twist on the Star Wars saga. LOVE.

[2] … I never had the Millennium Falcon or the Death Star, though… always wanted those…

WMB v8.0 was announced back in early October and has just arrived ready for  download in versions for distributed platforms, System z mainframes, and as a Hypervisor Edition for Linux and AIX (to be provisioned via the IBM Workload Deployer appliance).

As I did with WMQ last month, I wanted to take a moment to break out and highlight some of the key things in this release that you may have missed from the announcement letter. This won’t be a comprehensive list of everything, but I  want to point out some of the cooler features that you’ll want to be aware of. So, here we go…

(I’ve included a few screenshots to whet your appetite, click for larger versions!)

A simpler development experience

Version 8 brings a number of enhancements to the development experience, but one worth highlighting is what we call “Apps and Libs” – the idea that sets of message flows may be grouped into a unit called an Application which can be deployed, stopped and started as a whole. With Libraries, there are also truly re-usable assets like .esql files, or sub-flows, which can be deployed and updated separately, and invoked dynamically at runtime. This is a key change in the way that the Broker works – previously, sub-flows were compiled into the main flow and changing one required redeployment of all flows using it… they are now dynamically linked when needed, so they can be deployed and replaced more easily.

A new standards-based parser and message modeler

A new Data Format Description Language (DFDL, which you’ll sometimes hear called “daffodil”) enables any text or binary data to be understood within the message model. The Broker has had the “MRM” for many years, so of course could already do this, but DFDL is a new industry standard which can supersede the MRM (of course, you can continue to use your existing flows and message formats – you’re not forced to use DFDL). There’s a new mapper, too.

More importantly, coming along with DFDL and the mapper is a really, really nice set of utilities for testing message models inside the Toolkit – you’ll now be able to confirm that the model matches the test data without having to go through a full model->deploy-> test-at-runtime cycle. I saw this demo’ed at the WebSphere Technical Conference in Berlin during October and was blown away by it – it would have saved me a lot of time back in my consulting days!

Comprehensive .NET support

If you have .NET applications, assemblies, or services on the Windows platform, and you want to access those from your message flows – you can. If you want to write your message flow logic using C# or VB.NET or any .NET 4.0 CLR-supported language, using Visual Studio – you can.

If you don’t know how to get started with this stuff, the Toolkit has a new .NET Pattern to lead you by the hand and get you going quickly, and project wizards for Visual Studio.So, if you want a high-performance ESB platform that connects “anything to anything”, with minimal need to learn new skills, and run it on Windows with deep .NET integration – this release is going to cover your requirements.

Web administration

Delivered in version 8 is a first stage in making the Broker more easy to administer from a lightweight client – a web browser. Whilst power users and existing administrators can continue to use the Message Broker Explorer GUI, there is now an easy way to enable an optional web interface for basic administration tasks. Continuing the theme of simplicity the product has followed for a while, no additional moving parts (app or web servers) are required! Version 8.0 provides read-only views of running Applications and access to the log – more capabilities will be rolled into this interface in the future.

Record and Replay

Sometimes, when you are dealing with a set of end-to-end flows of data between applications, you may want the capability to record what is going on, and to replay specific scenarios and sets of events. This could be the case in audit, test, and many other scenarios. Another of the massive enhancements in version 8 is the Broker’s response to this requirement – again delivered using the same simple, lightweight interface offered by the web administration tool.

This also builds on technology around monitoring that has been progressively built into the Broker over the past couple of releases, so there are some really solid foundations and it is straightforward to set up.

Richer, yet easier to use

Just as I highlighted in my piece about WebSphere MQ 7.1, the Hursley teams have been strongly focused on “consumability” (translation for non-IBM-speakers = UX) for a number of years now. WMB continues to add capabilities that make it a richer, stronger integration platform, but also smooths out rough edges seen in earlier releases and is just… well… more productive to use. There’s even a drive to reduce the jargon and make the Broker logs more easy to understand, with new Activity Logging which aims to explain what a flow is doing in plain language (“GET message queue X”, “Update DB table Z”, and so on).

Taken together, the new wizards, web interfaces, integrated testing tools, message modelling tools, reduced dependencies, lightweight deployment with apps and libs… the combination just makes it a much more enjoyable experience for developer and administrators. And there’s a new installer, too.

The “papercuts” and node additions lists are huge: new JMSReceive node; new options for the File nodes; new Connect:Direct nodes; WS-ReliableMessaging support in the SOAP nodes; ability to install without root privileges; dynamic configuration of services without the need to restart execution groups… the list just goes on! Check out the product Information Center for more details on all of the features I just don’t have space to list.

… and finally…

Huge congratulations to some hard-working development teams in Hursley, Toronto and Bangalore in getting this release out there. As I’ve said before, I’ve been using the Broker for 10 years now and it just keeps getting better, and better. These guys are a very strong set of developers who turn out a fantastic, high quality product every time. Special thanks to MGK, @mqmatt, and @domstorey for some of the screenshots in this post

Footnote: version 8.0 is friendly to developers who use Ubuntu, too! Anton (my go-to guy on all things Debian – listen to him!) has some good advice about running WMB or WMQ on Ubuntu and Debian.

Related articles

• WebSphere MQ 7.1 is out – here’s why it’s cool… (andypiper.co.uk)
• European WebSphere Technical Conference 2011 (andypiper.co.uk)
• WebSphere MQ and Ubuntu (and other developer resources) (andypiper.co.uk)

I’ve spent most of October and November travelling to speak with customers and present at a couple of conferences around Europe. In that time, I generally had very few problems with network access.

On one occasion though, I realised just how tricky things are becoming, as “social” elements become increasingly baked in to the fabric of the Web. I was in Switzerland, and the plan was for me to present locally during the morning, and then to host and facilitate a conversation with a number of my colleagues in the Hursley lab during the afternoon. The hosts arranged guest wifi network access for me, so that we could make this work. I’d be able to use Sametime to receive files to present locally (we couldn’t access LotusLive), to clarify questions with the remote team, and to coordinate other team members to join the conversation as we went along.

This plan was initially all looking good, until I found that the VPN connection I was using to tunnel in to the corporate network would suddenly and apparently randomly, drop in the middle of a conversation.

After a while these VPN disconnections became more frequent, I became more frustrated, and the meeting became less productive.

… and that’s when I looked at the piece of paper I’d been given with my guest network credentials. To summarise, it said that guests would be subject to all of the same restrictions as employees regarding network access and specific sites were disallowed including “Personal email: Hotmail, Gmail etc; IM: Skype, Google Talk, etc; Social networking: Twitter, Facebook, etc”.

The penny dropped that my browser was sitting there with tabs open on sites like Gmail and Twitter. I shut them, reconnected, reconnected to the VPN, and things…. were better…. well, better, for a while.

I still wanted to use the Internet, of course, so I continued to do so – searching Google for relevant issues when questions were asked in the workshop. That’s when the VPN started flaking out again…. and that’s when I realised that with the Google redesign, the +1 features in the header bar were accessing Google+ when I loaded the Google page, treating that as a “social network”, and silently dropping my wifi connection.

This was a case where a heavy-handed filter, no doubt designed to “protect” the users from themselves and the organisation from inappropriate behaviour, actually impaired real work getting done. Either this technology needs to get a lot, lot smarter; companies need to reconsider these blocking rules, and trust an increasingly savvy workforce to behave responsibly; or the Web just needs to stop getting so darned social and… troublesome. Which option do you prefer?

I’m 35 years old. More than 20 years ago, I was at school, studying for my GCSEs and later my A-levels. One of the subjects I studied was English Literature. I love reading. I love literature. I love imaginative, creative writing.

There was, obviously, a set curriculum of texts I was expected to read, learn, and internalise. Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, and others. I’m glad I have that grounding. I was also allowed to read anything I wanted, from an early age – and I gravitated towards novelisations of Star Trek, of the Neverending Story, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and other science fiction and fantasy stories.

Around the age of 12 or 13 I stumbled upon the Dragonriders of Pern series. At the time, I was interested in Games Workshop and Warhammer… a fantasy world involving dragons and, ultimately, a rediscovery of technology, was an obvious step.

So, I started to read the Pern chronicles. I remember reporting on them in my “reading diary” aged around 12 or 13 – a series of books about a near-mediaeval planet where dragonriders saved the population from the deadly Thread. It wasn’t until I read The White Dragon that I really appreciated that this wasn’t just a trash teen fantasy series – themes of erotic passion, love, independence, adventure, and intelligence were involved (and would connect to science fiction, computing and other directions beyond that tale).

I’m deeply saddened to learn that Anne McCaffrey has passed. Her tales and her books truly did light up my early teenage years. I loved the Dragonriders of Pern stories and I hope that others will connect with them in the same way in the future. Thank you, Anne.

I’m going to spend this post talking about WMQ 7.1, which became available in electronic download form for the distributed platforms last Friday (z/OS will follow shortly). I’ll return to talk about all the (über)-coolness in Message Broker a little closer to the release date for that product.

So what is the big deal in this release?

It brings parallel / multi-version install

From version 7.1 onwards, there is now the capability to install more than one copy of WMQ on a system, for Windows and UNIX platforms. This includes installing alongside WMQ v7.0.1.6 (fixpack 6 on v7.0.1, the minimum level for multi-version install to work) – you can have one copy of v7.0.1.6, and multiple copies of 7.1, for example – and future versions will also be able to be installed in parallel, should the need arise. This should make migration and testing simpler. Applications can now point to their “own” install of WMQ if required. The GSKit installation, which provides some of the security functions for the queue manager, now gets installed “inside” the main installation as well, to make the whole thing more self-contained, and potentially easier to embed into other solutions if needed.

Here’s a teaser image from a Windows system that my colleague “mqjeff” sent me earlier today he has 7.0.1.6 and 7.1 on the same machine.

It’s (even more) secure

WebSphere MQ has always had a number of strong security capabilities, including SSL for channel authentication and encryption, and fine-grained access control of queue manager objects via the Object Authority Manager. It has also been possible to add transparent, per-message / per-queue / per-policy on-disk encryption and signing of message data via the Advanced Message Security feature. In v7.1, a renewed focus on end-to-end security adds the ability to authorise on a per-IP/user connection basis, as well as adding more crypto algorithms and additional authorisation options, and making much more of that security function available via the MQSC administration tool. T-Rob has a much more complete post about these changes so I won’t go into any more detail here.

It runs better, on bigger systems

Bigger systems… like the z196 mainframes? Well, that’s one example, yes, but WMQ v7.1 has been more optimised for big and multicore systems in general. On the mainframe, there are a bunch of great enhancements such as increased resilience in dealing with shared queues in a coupling facility, and the introduction of Shared Message Data Sets (SMDS) to significantly improve performance there as well. Let’s just say that the performance numbers for z/OS are looking really, really good… which brings me on to…

It continues to push the performance envelope

A major focus on performance in the v7.1 cycle has produced some fantastic results, and when the performance reports appear (as SupportPacs, within the next few weeks), you’ll see the “fastest WMQ ever”. This theme runs throughout everything: not just the base runtime messaging, but also things like making the WMQ Explorer tooling significantly snappier to operate as well (oh, and that’s now 60% smaller, and more sleek!)

There is also a new option for publish/subscribe applications – the ability to publish on a topic via multicast. This re-uses some of the technology from the WebSphere MQ Low Latency product so that it can run very fast. After the initial application startup, it means that applications can also operate when the queue manager is not available.

It adds Telemetry to the base install

No surprise that I’d highlight this one (it is also an important part of the overall story, per the next heading!) – I’ve been talking about the IBM implementation of MQTT, the open protocol which is being standardised and which it was just-announced will be part of the Eclipse Paho M2M project, for the past couple of years.

In WMQ v7.1, there is no longer a separate installation to run in order to add this support. On the platforms where the Telemetry feature is supported – Windows, Linux IA64, and (new in v7.1) AIX – this is now an optional part of the base installation. That means it is very easy to try out. Oh, and as well as being integrated with WMQ Explorer, the full range of Telemetry objects can now also be administered via the MQSC command line.

It brings the family together

This is a big one, in my opinion. I’ve mentioned that WMQ “base” can now interoperate with WMQLLM via the multicast publish-and-subscribe support; and the WMQ Telemetry functionality is “in the box” as part of the installer on the relevant platforms.

Why do these things that matter? Well, as I mentioned in my recent MQTT FAQ, something that IBM has observed over a number of years of building and delivering production-ready messaging middleware is that one size does not fit all. There’s the fundamental transactional messaging backbone (WMQ base) which needs to be solid, reliable, and easy to administer through comprehensive scripted and graphical tools… but beyond that, there are some additional qualities of service that need to be considered. There’s the very high speed, low latency use case which may be very specialised (WMQLLM), and there’s the need to deal with small and constrained devices and less-reliable networks (WMQ Telemetry / MQTT). Of course, you may also want to perform file transfer over that infrastructure (WMQ File Transfer Edition), secure your messaging (WMQ AMS), or route and transform your data and connect with “foreign” systems via different protocols (WebSphere Message Broker). I’ve been talking about this as part of IBM’s Messaging Vision for a number of years and it is really showing through in this release of WebSphere MQ. It’s a complete story.

It addresses many “papercuts”

On top of all of that… the team has really tried to address many of the common papercut issues, by which I mean the gotchas, annoyances, and the “wouldn’t it be so much better if….”s. Things like, gosh, I wish I knew what version of WMQ that client is using to connect to me? (yep, you can find out now).  How about “bind on group” for messages in a cluster? The ability to backup / dump and restore the configuration of a queue manager without needing to use a SupportPac? There’s a real sense of “fit and finish”, and I believe that shows that the development team have been listening to feedback and making the tweaks that users have been asking for where possible.

So – all-in-all, there’s a lot in this release that makes it worth a look, either from the perspective of users who are looking at an upgrade to gain performance, security and usability benefits; or for those looking for a solid, dependable messaging platform which can support modern applications. There’s a lot of excitement and innovation going on in the “traditional Message Oriented Middleware” space at the moment and WMQ and the related protocols like MQTT are right at the heart of those trends.

To learn more about the features I’ve talked about, and some that I haven’t, check out the online Infocenter. You can also check out the “What’s New in WMQ v7.1″ presentation from the WebSphere Technical Conference, via T-Rob’s blog.

It’s all about machine-to-machine (or M2M) communications, Smarter Planet, and the Internet of Things.

Before I dive in to this, a few clarifications. First, I’m being described in a couple of news stories as “an IBM distinguished engineer”, and whilst I wish that was true, I’ve yet to ascend to those heights! Also, there are various numbers being quoted – note that the figures in the press release were not invented by IBM, the headline number of an expected 50 billion connected devices by 2020 comes from a recent study conducted by Ericsson AB. Oh, and this isn’t about a “new” protocol – MQTT has been in use since 1999.

The other clarification is that some articles seem to suggest that IBM is out to create some kind of new, alternative, Web – that’s not what has been announced, and I’m certainly not aware of any such plan! It’s about connecting “things” – sensors, mobile devices, embedded systems, even small appliances or medical devices for example – to the Web and the associated platform and ecosystem of technologies, not about reinventing or recreating them. I’m personally a huge fan of the Web as a platform

Oh, and of course, the obligatory “all opinions expressed are my own” – this is my understanding of where things are going, although of course I’m talking about events I’m directly involved in!

So what is this all about?

Two things.

1. On Nov 2, IBM, Eurotech, Sierra Wireless and Eclipse formed a new M2M Industry Working Group at Eclipse. Sierra had already started the “Koneki” project at Eclipse to work on M2M tools, and the Working Group will look at a range of topics together, such as M2M tooling, software components, open communication and messaging protocols, data formats, and APIs.

2. On Nov 3, IBM and Eurotech announced the donation of their C and Java clients for MQTT to a new Eclipse project called “Paho” which is under proposal in the incubator – with code expected to hit the repository within the next couple of months. MQTT is being given to Eclipse to live within the M2M ecosystem that is emerging there, and to provide an avenue for adoption of the protocol as a more pervasive standard for connected devices.

How is that news? Isn’t MQTT already open / free?

Technically… kinda, sorta

The MQTT specification has been published under a royalty-free license for some time, and that has led to a fantastic community contributing a range of different projects. IBM and Eurotech took this approach from early on, because it wouldn’t have been possible to compile and support code on every embedded platform that might come along – far simpler to set the protocol free.

Initially the specification was hidden away in the WebSphere Message Broker documentation, but last year it was republished, moved to a new home on developerWorks, and the license was clarified.

In August, IBM and Eurotech announced their intention to take MQTT to a standards organisation. The specific organisation has not yet been finalised, but this is also an important step in ensuring that MQTT is not “just” an IBM protocol, but something of general use which the community can feel comfortable with. If you’d like to join that discussion then there’s a Get Involved page on the mqtt.org community site.

The missing piece was code – a reference implementation, if you like. That’s one reason why the Eclipse Paho announcement is significant.

Why else is this significant?

Well, here are some of my musings on that one:

• it shows IBM is serious, by committing code and open sourcing it (as with the original Eclipse donation in 2001);
• the M2M Industry Working Group exists to foster the discussion in this space;
• it makes high-quality reference Java and C client implementations freely available in source form, with a good Java implementation something that has been particularly lacking;
• it creates an opportunity for Eclipse projects to use MQTT, and to develop tools on top of it.

The press release and Paho project proposals aren’t clear (to me) – what exactly is being donated?

IBM is seeding Eclipse Paho with C and Java client implementations of MQTT. Eurotech is donating a framework and sample applications which device and client developers can use when integrating and testing messaging components.

Why C and Java clients (aren’t they “dying” languages?) Where’s my Perl and Ruby code?!

IBM had previously made some C and Java code available in some SupportPacs, but those are outdated and the license for reuse was never clear.

It’s important to realise that this stuff came from the embedded world of 10 (and more) years ago, and continues to be applied in that industrial space. That category of device typically runs some kind of realtime Java-based OS, or a Linux-based or other runtime with a GCC toolchain for the CPU in question. C and Java are genuinely the most useful implementations to get out there. Oh, and on that “those old languages” thing – I think you’ll find they are very widely used (Android, iOS etc run variants of sorts, most non-web app development is likely to be in one or the other).

We’re very fortunate that clients libraries for a wide range of languages already exist thanks to the MQTT community – see the list at mqtt.org!

Hold on… don’t we need a broker / server / gateway?

Yes. But, one step at a time!

There are brokers available for free today, either as precompiled binaries or as full Open Source implementations, so this is not a dead end from day one.

The Paho project scope outlines the intention to add a broker to the project in the future, and to host an M2M sandbox for developers as well. That is where we are today, and this position will evolve over time.

Why Eclipse?

The Eclipse Foundation has been a fantastic success story (oh, and, Happy 10th Birthday, Eclipse!). As the scope of their mission has broadened beyond an IDE to the web, build environments, and all kinds of other tools, it was a good place for Sierra Wireless to kick off the Eclipse Koneki M2M tools project, and is now a natural place for this primarily M2M protocol to be hosted under Paho. As James Governor notes in his write-up of the news:

… the Eclipse Public License is designed to support derivative works and embedding, while the Eclipse Foundation can provide the stewardship of same. One of the main reasons Eclipse has been so successful is that rather than separate software from specification it brings them together – in freely available open source code – while still allowing for proprietary extensions which vendors can sell.

How quickly will the code donation happen?

The Paho proposal tentatively includes dates in November and December 2011 – there will need to be various approvals as code is accepted into Eclipse, so that may “flex” a little, but it is all in the pipeline.

OK… Why MQTT? Why not HTTP/XMPP/AMQP/PubSubHubbub/WebSockets/etcetcetc?

To answer this one adequately I’d probably end up addressing each individual difference between protocols in turn, and if you’ve heard me speak about MQTT I’ve covered some of this before – so I’ll keep this answer relatively brief. I will admit that I’ve been asked about all of these by journalists in the past couple of days.

There is space for a range of protocols to coexist, because they address different areas. In the messaging space, we’ve found over time that whilst efforts to create a single protocol have been made, that has often ended up as focused around a particular set of qualities of service, and not optimised to cover the the whole range of them.

For example, if we look at IBM’s own messaging protocols – there are several. There’s WebSphere MQ which is all about reliable, transactional, solid, clusterable, enterprise, JMS and other APIs, etc etc.. WMQ itself isn’t ideal for very high-speed in-memory or multicast scenarios, so there is also WMQ Low Latency (interoperable with the new multicast feature in WMQ 7.1, but a separate protocol). Neither WMQ LLM or WMQ scales down to unreliable device networks and embedded systems, so there is WMQ Telemetry (aka MQTT), which was specifically designed for constrained devices and networks, and that can interoperate with the main queue manager, too. Oh, and sometimes you want to deal with files (WMQ File Transfer Edition), or access message data via HTTP (WMQ HTTP Bridge). You need to address a range of requirements in a messaging story.

So why not those others? In this case, IBM believes that MQTT is ideally-suited to the Smarter Planet Instrumented->Interconnected layer – it’s tiny, not synchronous and brittle, isn’t specific to the web as it is all about data rather than documents, XML etc etc. In these scenarios, REST principles may add an overhead. Oh, and it has been around for over 10 years, and has been proven across a range of industries and in a range of extreme conditions. IBM’s commercial implementation is known to scale to hundreds of thousands of connected devices, and we know that is the direction that this space is heading.

Congratulations! / Thank you!

Thanks, but don’t congratulate or thank me! I’m familiar with this stuff, I’ve coded with this stuff, but I didn’t invent it and I didn’t write it. There are some amazing folks at both IBM and Eurotech (and some who have moved on) who started this all off in 1999, and who have helped to implement solutions using this protocol since then, and who have of course developed it. Several of them are on Twitter if you want to say hi! And huge thanks again to the community of folks that formed around mqtt.org and contributed client and server implementations – that absolutely helped to move things forward to this point.

HERE ENDS TODAY’S Q&A!

That, hopefully helps to clarify a few things and answers some of the questions I’ve seen via Twitter, forums, and mailing lists over the past few days. It has been something of a blur, to be honest, but a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to the next stage – working with the community more, working with our friends at Eurotech, Sierra Wireless and elsewhere, and making the M2M space much more real.

For more, here are a bunch of stories I’ve seen in the past couple of days… no particular order, just my cut-and-paste list!

• Smarter Planet blog
• mqtt.org news
• Bob Sutor
• ReadWriteWeb
• PCWorld
• VDC Research
• WebWereld (NL)
• Technolenta (RU)
• ConnectedWorld
• Simon Phipps at ComputerWorld
• Complex.com
• Developer.com
• James Governor
• H-Online
• mosquitto blog
• Design Thinking Thoughts

I’ll be in Berlin next week 10th-14th October, participating in at least one panel, speaking about MQTT, and also covering the latest on IBM MQ messaging technologies as they relate to cloud and web. There’s a Lanyrd event page where I’ll try to collate information relating to the individual talks.b

I have a feeling that by this time next week there could be quite a lot to talk about…

Related articles

• WebSphere MQ and Ubuntu (and other developer resources) (andypiper.co.uk)

I’d previously explained to the organisers that I hadn’t spent so much time exploring virtual worlds lately as I was doing three or four years ago at the height of IBM’s involvement with platforms such as Second Life and our own internal Metaverse. Having said that, I have spent more time with gaming platforms such as XBox and the Nintendo 3DS since then, and more recently also Minecraft. Naturally I did have that business perspective and story to share… and, as the closing keynote I had the interesting task of pulling together the threads we’d covered during the breakout sessions at the conference, as well as attempting to look ahead to what trends might be important in the future.

The video is online via the Open University website and the talk with Q&A lasted for about an hour. More coverage of ReLIVE 11 is aggregated on Lanyrd.

Summary

As I noted in the opening and closing sections of the talk – predictions of the future are a hit-and-miss affair. We may now have tablet computers arguably even cooler than the Star Trek padds and communicators, but I’m still waiting on my hoverboard. Nevertheless, I tried to frame the story of IBM’s exploration of virtual worlds and 3D environments with some discussion of trends. It also gave me an excuse to talk about Back to the Future, and a cool ad that Nike recently released tying back in to the movie.

I want to reiterate (as it may not have been clear from tweets that emerged during the event) that these were very much my own thoughts and not the views of my employer – in fact, I was attending the event in a personal capacity. So, per the presentation, my thoughts on trends to watch in the next five years:

1. 3D Printing: I’ve seen RepRap and other 3D printers more often in the past couple of months than ever before, and it is clear that prototyping and fabrication are coming within financial and technical reach of more than just the early adopting minority. That’s not to say this is something I see going “mainstream” – but as access opens up, expect to see many more interesting things happening here.
2. Social broadcast: I think “TV” is rapidly giving way to a more generalised broadcast media that is being consumed across multiple devices, remixed, shared, etc. I also think that social streams are adding to the experience of how these media are being consumed, as evidenced by hashtags broadcast on BBC programmes, and the ways in which conversations form online around events and video streams.  A nod to my friend Roo Reynolds too, a man constantly way ahead of his time…
3. Touch and Gesture: we already know that the ways in which we interact with technology is evolving fast. Watch any child approach a large screen and attempt to press the screen, expecting their cartoon hero to become interactive. This is not going to stop – Microsoft have some amazing technology in this space with Kinect and we should get used to and embrace the changes as they happen if we want to evolve.
4. Big Data: a nod to my own organisation’s Smarter Planet story, and an acknowledgement that every one of the major tech firms is investing in ways to store, mine, slice and analyse the increasing amounts of data flowing in from the environment and our personal signals. This is just a continuing story, but we’re at a point where it is a red hot topic. It would have been a good point to mention Watson, if I’d thought on my feet quickly enough!
5. Identity: this is not so much something where we will see technical progress necessarily, as an area I think will be a threat, and difficult to resolve. The nymwars of Google+ are one edge of the issue. I believe that there is a real tension between the freewheeling days of the earlier Internet, the desire of individuals to make their own choices about identity (often for valid social reasons, other times for vanity), and corporations and political entities that want to close this situation down. This is going to be a tricky one.

So what of virtual worlds? Three words: Not Gone Away. They may have morphed, lost their early shine, the bubble burst – but we have a range of immersive experiences (and social, but not necessarily immersive ones) through which we interact. I mentioned Minecraft and how that is being used for teaching. I talked through IBM’s work with serious gaming. I spoke about the IBM Virtual Center briefly, and that’s online and used today – in fact Jack Mason just posted a nice deck on that which carries some statistics, if you want to learn more.

Thoughts on education

I clearly was not the most experienced individual in the room when it came to discussions about teaching and education, and I particularly enjoyed hearing different presenters at ReLIVE11 talk about how they are using OpenSim, OpenWonderland and other platforms. However – after my recent post on Raspberry Pi and my exploration of the Brighton Mini Maker Faire I’ve been thinking increasingly about Maker culture and how we could bring technology teaching back around to practical matters.  I was disappointed to read the Government’s (lack of) response to John Graham-Cumming’s recent letter on the same subject, though.

One of the things that I called out as a barrier to the adoption of immersive worlds and new technologies at work is something I’m calling The Empty Room Problem – the fact that unless you build it and then populate it, they will not necessarily come. I’ll be writing about this some more shortly, prompted by Derek Jones’ great blog post.

During the Q&A session I gave an answer to one of the questions which contained some ideas I’ve had on a possible curriculum – I’ll try to expand on those in the near future as well.

Of course, thanks to the changes Apple have made to the way in-app content is sold, with 30% of that sale going straight to them through iTunes, sellers like Amazon have decided to stop allowing digital content to be ordered in-app on the iOS platform. I can’t really blame them, although it’s interesting to see Microsoft rumoured to be following the now-established “30% App Store rule” for Metro apps Windows 8, with other content gatekeepers likely to follow suit, one would assume.

So I get a polite message telling me that rather than buying Jeff’s book, I can go ahead and add it to my wish list, change to the website via Safari (how many iOS users actually realise the browser is called “Safari”, incidentally?), and purchase it there.

The first thing the Amazon website wants to  do is entice me to download the Amazon App for iPhone. I’m using an iPhone, so why wouldn’t I want it? I smirk to myself and continue. It’s actually just as quick to repeat the product search on the website as it would have been to add the item to my wish list, find the wish list, and open the item.

Once it gets to the part where taking the money is involved, of course, Amazon have that just as well sorted as they ever did – one click and I am, as they say, done… well, apart from the part where the website assumed I wanted to book sent to my iPhone, since I was shopping from that device. Anyway… looking forward to reading Jeff’s new book on my Kindle later tomorrow!

No wonder Amazon want to just go out and build an all-in-one content and physical goods purchasing tablet.

Related articles

• Amazon Bypasses Apple’s New iOS Rules With Kindle Cloud Reader [Amazon] (gizmodo.com)
• Amazon Kindle Tablet Could Shake Up Tablet Wars, And Here’s How (pcworld.com)

I’ve been blogging here for a number of years now and it’s always fascinating to see what search terms lead people in. For the first few years it was a post on the UK direct.gov car tax renewal site, because people seemed to be typing the URL into Google and Yahoo (instead of the address bar) and hitting my site rather than the actual service.

From the results over the past 12 months it seems that people usually are looking for me, or for something on MQTT. Some of the other search terms, though, are quite surprising… Visio? VMWare? iMovie 09? it has been a while since I wrote about those.

On another note, I’ve now got the new Google Authorship markup working, so hopefully search results should be linked to my Google Profile along with my happy smiling face…

Related articles

• What Does Google Think Your Site Is About? (blindfiveyearold.com)

So, what about developing with or using WebSphere MQ on Ubuntu? Well, the officially-supported platforms for WebSphere MQ V7.0.x don’t include Ubuntu – that’s primarily a combination of the relative popularity of RedHat or SuSE Enterprise platforms in production deployments, time and resource spent on testing, and the fact that it would probably only be practical to test and support it on a Long Term Support release if it ever became supported.

However, it is possible to get WMQ installed and running on Ubuntu without jumping through too many hoops. The primary stumbling block is that the software is packaged in RPM format rather than in Debian/Ubuntu-friendly DEB files. One piece of advice is to avoid any guides that suggest converting the packages using alien… it may seem unusual, but you’re likely to find it far easier to get it working by installing rpm on the system instead. My colleague Rob Convery has posted a couple of very useful blog entries on this subject which I’d recommend if you have a need to get yourself running on Ubuntu – again, bearing in mind that it is not an officially supported platform, and that should you encounter issues then it might be necessary to reproduce them under RHEL or SLES when raising a service call with IBM.

• Install MQ 7.0.1.0 onto Ubuntu 10.04 (or greater)
• Apply MQ Service on Ubuntu

There are other ways to get to use and learn about WMQ too, of course – for example, you could grab one of the IBM Industry Application Platform cloud images to run on the IBM SmartCloud or Amazon EC2 (containing WAS V7, DB2 Express-C 9.7, and WMQ V7.0.1, running on SLES), or you can try a number of the WMQ family products in IBM’s SOA Sandbox, (including WMQ File Transfer Edition, and WMQ Advanced Message Security). You can also check out the MQonTV YouTube channel. Let me know what you think!

A sad state of affairs

I believe that we have lived through the best period to teach and learn about computers and technology, and that over the past few years we have been creating a void, a vacuum, in which progress may be diminished.

Google’s Eric Schmidt recently called out the British education system as holding back or dismissing our technology heritage. According to a ZDNet article on his speech in Edinburgh:

Schmidt said the UK’s approach to technology in education — not making IT compulsory as a subject at the GSCE-level and not providing enough support for science students at colleges — meant the country was “throwing away” its computing heritage.

See also the BBC and Guardian coverage of the story.

I can’t say I think he’s wrong, and I can’t say I’m surprised. Anyone who has heard me ranting about the state of things in a side conversation at any recent event in the past couple of years, will have heard me tell a similar story. When I was a lad – and I know that some of those who read this will be older, just let me reminisce without interrupting, OK? – I grew up on an early Commodore PET with green screen, followed by BBC Micros, Acorn Electrons, etc. I’ve had a couple of occasions to look back on that era recently, with a visit to The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, seeing the team from TNMoC visit the Brighton Mini Maker Faire, and through talking to folks at TransferSummit (of which more, in a moment). In my day, you plugged in the power, the machine made a satisfying BEEP! and you were presented with a black screen with the word BASIC and a > prompt. That’s just how things worked. To do anything else, you had to tell the computer to do it – and you learned a lot as you did so!

Without wanting to sound like some kind of old fogey – kids today never had it so good! They have grown up in an era where all they have ever known is a world where every computer is connected to the Internet, a giant brain which appears to be all-knowing (and I know that this is how a 3 or 4 year old thinks: my own younger family members have said “we’ll just look it up on the Internet, it knows everything”, without understanding that humans have known everything, and the computers just tell us what we’ve told them, at a basic level). They have fast, interactive machines which are dramatically more usable – and instead of bulky noisy systems which were just about user-serviceable, ideally when you had an antistatic wrist strap to hand… they have magic, thin, sheets of glass that can be controlled at the slightest touch.

That’s fantastic. It puts children today in a position where they can be more creative than ever before – I could barely edit low-quality digital scanned photos by the time I left school, let alone edit full HD video with a variety of awesome effects. So one thing we can teach them is how to use creative tools like… oh I don’t know… Office suites (capitalisation deliberate, sarcasm heavy).

The thing is – we don’t need to teach schoolchildren how to use a productivity tool like that. By the time they have sat watching us for 5 minutes aged 6, they intuitively “just get it”. Worse is the fact that we’ve nearly removed the ability to look under the covers at what makes the machines work – certainly in a hardware sense you’d need a very advanced knowledge of microelectronics to do anything with the innards of most smartphones, and software is often becoming more and more locked up to the whims of the hardware manufacturers (naming no Apples). Plus of course, everything is online. So what does this mean for the curiosity to take things apart either in hardware or software, see how they work, and build something new?

(the irony is not lost on me that as a History graduate, I’m an unusual spokesperson for this debate)

Makers and getting back to basics

One of the reasons I’m excited by the trend towards making things – what I’ll term the Maker movement, in a nod to the Brighton Mini Maker Faire and the magazine that has inspired the events – is that it reflects both our natural human curiosity and interest in building things, and making them work. I also think that is part of the reason behind our interest in prototypable electronics like Arduino - we have gone through a period of making things smaller, more compressed and proprietary, and the pendulum is swinging back towards open hardware, simple construction, and ease of learning. This is a huge, great and important step, in my opinion.

Enter – a Raspberry Pi

So how can we take advantage of that trend towards discovery and learning, and combine it with small cheap electronics, to really make a difference? Well, you may have heard of the Raspberry Pi Foundation – it has had a fair amount of coverage in the UK anyway, with the promise of a new low-cost computing platform which could theoretically replicate the success of the BBC-sponsored, Acorn-built, BBC Microcomputers from the 1980s (and backed by one of the most successful computer games authors of that era). Those BBC Micro systems were rolled out across schools all over the UK, and pretty much anyone in the 30-40 age bracket will have learned to write some kind of BBC BASIC or LOGO code at some point in their education, and have looked at fractals and played a variety of classic 8-bit games. My first home computer was an Acorn Electron, an affordable beige “keyboard box” that could be plugged straight into a home TV in 1984, with games and programs loaded off a (then) common cassette player.

The folks at Raspberry Pi believe that having a cheap computer which can be presented as an education device could be a success. At the TransferSummit last week, I met Eben and Liz Upton from the project, and had a chance to play with the system first hand. I also made a quick film of this amazing little computer playing full HD video – and the excitement is obvious in the fact that it has received nearly 50k hits on YouTube in just 4 days, probably helped by an appearance on the Raspberry Pi blog and also in a feature on Geek.com!

One of the things that Eben spoke about was the idea that it would almost be more interesting for these things to boot to a Python prompt instead of a full Linux desktop (which it is well-capable of doing), in order to ignite kids’ imaginations and force them into doing something more creative than simply doing what they would do with any other computer. I kinda like that suggestion!

Risks, and what else can we do?

I’m excited. As I said several times to Liz and others at the event this week – it’s a British organisation with vision, with an amazing idea, a product that works, and the desire to really reconnect children – particularly those in the developing world – with technology and how to drive it.

I can see a  number of risks, but the last thing I want is to be a naysayer here – I really, really want these folks to succeed. However, just looking at the excitement amongst hobbyists like me, and reading some of the comments posted on my video already, I realise that there’s a danger that the supplies of these things will quickly be snapped up by those wanting to make funky small home systems for themselves, rather than the altruistic wanting to help youngsters to learn (heck, I want one! so I understand that!). Or, kids may see these as just another form-factor of computer of the kind they are used to, plug it in, go online, and do nothing different to what they are already capable of. Another issue is that a bare board (the initial version won’t have a box, although that would be easy enough to fab) and a lack of instructions or clear fixed “syllabus”, if you like, may discourage teachers now used to teaching desktop computing and productivity tools, from embracing the potential to help students to create. It’s also entirely possible that these things will simply be cloned elsewhere. For all of these reasons, I’m determined to do what I can to promote the Raspberry Pi concept as an educational tool, and to support the team behind it. It’s important. It deserves to be a massive success.

So, what else can we do?

One thing is to go and sign the brilliant Emma Mulqueeny (aka @hubmum)’s e-petition on the UK gov website. She’s campaigning for an earlier entry for programming into the classroom, at primary level, particularly to encourage more girls to take an interest in technology. I think this is a brilliant step. Nik Butler has posted about the importance of teaching this stuff, too, and I encourage you to read his post – I particularly support the way in which he refutes the list of reasons why this sort of teaching is allegedly a “bad” idea. He’s also talked about the Raspberry Pi on the Social Media White Noise podcast #70.

Another thing is to visit and support The National Museum of Computing, preferably with some kids you know – help them to see where we have come from and where we are going.

It’s obvious to me that we need to change the way we think about teaching IT, computing, and technology. Earlier teaching of programming is important. I also think that a basic understanding of how a computer system fits together would help, as well as a high-level understanding of the way in which the Internet works. Importantly though – and this rolls into a whole other passion of mine which I won’t rant about today – increasingly as we come together online, I think it is increasingly important to teach tolerance, understanding of other cultures, and good online community behaviour. How we collectively go about doing that, I’m not entirely sure – but it feels important.

Thanks for indulging me on this particularly long post – it really is a subject I care deeply about. And all that stuff about technology – from an historian and Arts student

Related articles

• Kids today need a licence to tinker (guardian.co.uk)
• Programming in the Primary Classroom (digital-teacher.co.uk)
• 5 reasons why [some] teachers don’t teach programming (digital-teacher.co.uk)
• Video: Raspberry Pi $25 Computer Running Quake III (techcrunch.com)
• Ask Director Eben Upton About the Raspberry Pi Foundation (hardware.slashdot.org)

TransferSummit bills itself as

… a forum for business executives and members of the academic and research community to discuss requirements, challenges, and opportunities in the use, development, licensing, and future innovation in Open Source technology.

Unlike a *Camp event, this wasn’t a self-organising unconference, and was much more business-focused. The sense I had was that it was far more about “getting down to work” than the more fun Open Source-oriented events that I otherwise attend. There were a range of fantastic speakers, and with my good friend James Governor giving the opening keynote it really didn’t take me long to decide that it was something that I should get to.

Not only that, but the event was held at my alma mater Oxford, in the rather lovely surroundings of Keble College – which I don’t remember ever having visited whilst I was at university – it was red brick, comparatively far up Parks Road away from my college, in the “science area”, and as a History student I simply never had much occasion to go up there! Have to say that I was very impressed by the college, accommodation, and service from students and staff. Fantastic.

You can explore more of my TransferSummit 2011 photos on Picasa.

I really enjoyed a number of elements of TransferSummit. Firstly, whilst there were a few folks I knew from my other networks, it was largely a group of people I’d not come across before directly, so it was a great opportunity to meet some new people in this space. It wasn’t too much of an echo chamber, and as Ross Gardler said during his introduction, it wasn’t a crowd of folks who already “get it” in terms of Open Source usage and adoption – there were a fair few organisations on the edge of making choices and I felt that the talks were more about how to go about making sensible ones, putting the right governance practices in place, and learning from the successes and mistakes of others.

I couldn’t cover all three tracks of the agenda in detail, but I’ll highlight a few particularly interesting sessions I did listen to (again, there’s more complete coverage on Lanyrd):

• James Governor on open society and related trends
• Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi project (on which I shall write more soon)
• Carlo Daffara on the Economic Value of Open Source (which was the stand-out talk of the event, for me – very useful facts and figures supporting use and reuse of Open Source)
• Steve Lee on Community Anti-Patterns

Another nice element of the event was the “gadget playtime” Open Source (and not-so-open) Hardware area, where I spent a lot of time talking to the folks from OSHUG and other projects.

One of the things that was negatively commented on via Twitter and other discussions was that Microsoft was the Platinum sponsor of the event. I found that very interesting, particularly where the commenters weren’t present at TransferSummit itself. To reassure those who may have stayed away or otherwise expressed concerns, I’ll just say that there was very definitely no “Microsoft agenda” being pushed, that my friend Steve Lamb was there very much in “listen, learn and interact” mode, but that others who attended and who I greatly respect did express other views about some elements of their participation (and I imagine it’s not hard to track those opinions down via hashtags etc.). Either way, having been involved with various conferences now, I fully support the idea that having a wide range of sponsors willing to help fund a professional conference and make is successful is important, so I thank Microsoft, HP and all of the sponsors (and in particular to the folks from OpenDirective) for enabling it to happen.

Definitely a worthwhile way to spend a couple of days of time – a well-run, informative event with great experiences shared, and some good contacts that I look forward to maintaining. My tip: look out for similar events and make an effort to mingle with the business, academic and government communities on Open Source. You might just learn something.

Disclosure: I was (unexpectedly) generously comp’d a ticket enabling me to attend, thanks to the organisers. My employer had no involvement and I attended on my own time.

Related articles

• TransferSummit: Accessibility adoption expands in open innovation (h-online.com)
• UK.gov works on YET ANOTHER open-source push (go.theregister.com)
• Quick notes from Mark O’Neill’s Transfer Summit 2011 talk (grep.codeconsult.ch)
• Big Question (Answered): “Can an Open Source Project be Closed to the Public?” (readwriteweb.com)

Happy one year anniversary to us! Twelve months ago exactly, @natbat and @simonw launched lanyrd.com from a flat in Casablanca!—
Lanyrd (@lanyrd) August 31, 2011

I’ve been helping to curate some of the event pages for things like OggCamp and BMMF recently. After my recent mention of Lanyrd on UUPC, it struck me that I was getting a few people ask how to do things like linking to coverage of a recent event, or saying things like “I’m not on Lanyrd, can you do it for me?”… when they do indeed have profiles on the site, since they are on Twitter and someone has already added them as a speaker at an event, for example. It’s crowdsourced social event management, folks – similar to a Wikipedia for conferences, if you like – have at it, get in there, and add the information that makes it more useful to all of us

Anyway, with that in mind, I thought I’d do a really quick screencast to point out a few of the main features. Hope it turns out to be useful!

Disclosure: although I talk about it a lot, I have no direct interest in the company, site or service – I just think it’s incredibly useful and the team behind it are lovely people!

Update 7th Sept: Lanyrd just announced new investors – so it is onwards and upwards!

Related articles

• Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S04E14 – Revelations (podcast.ubuntu-uk.org)
• Lanyrd now has 2,500 videos and 3,000 slide decks from events around the world (lanyrd.com)
• Makers are cool (andypiper.co.uk)

It has been several weeks since OggCamp 11 now. I’ve been meaning to post a quick recap for a while.

I’ve written before about being friends with the crew from the Ubuntu UK Podcast (UUPC), so I’ve been following the progress of OggCamp over the past couple of years. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend either OggCamp 1 (2009) in Wolverhampton or OggCamp 2 in Liverpool last year.

Waitaminute… OggCamp?

Sounds like a weird name, huh?

Well… yeah ok, it is a bit odd. Breaking it down, there’s an audio file format called Ogg Vorbis which was intended to be a non-patent-encumbered, higher quality alternative to MP3. Many FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) supporters and audiophiles prefer it to MP3 and many podcasts aimed at these communities offer the .ogg format as an alternative to .mp3. The “Camp” idea is basically that of an unconference, popularised by events such as BarCamp – often a weekend-long gathering about nothing and everything in particular, with late night hacking and geekery. And being an unconference, the first rule of the event is that you definitely, definitely, have to talk about whatever you are ever passionate about, and participate.

So you smoosh together Ogg + Camp and you get…

… a very cool event populated by folks from the FLOSS and audio communities, often attracted by listening to podcasts like Linux Outlaws or the Ubuntu UK Podcast… the two teams that started the OggCamp events a few years ago as a kind of successor to the previous LugRadio Live. It’s not only about audio, although there tends to be some content on that subject, as well as some live podcast recordings, and other craziness.

OggCamp 11 was “my first time”. It was held at the Farnham Maltings, a lovely venue that is very close to where I live (and also where we’ve held some Digital Surrey events in the past), so it would have been mad for me not to have attended, and just rude of me not to have offered to volunteer as part of the crew.

My excitement turned to a slight amount of trepidation a few days before things kicked off, when our now-legendary crew chieftan Les Pounder sent us out an email to check that everyone was “OK with heavy lifting”… as it happened, that wasn’t too much of a problem! It was a pleasure to work with Les and the rest of the team actually – everyone was very laid back, happy, and just made things happen. I’d been wondering how onerous crew duties would be and whether they would prevent me from participating as an unconference attendee, but everything was shared around so I still found time for yet another talk on MQTT, and for some trademark heckling from the cheap seats during various other sessions.

You can explore my Flickr set from the event, but let me pick out a few small highlights:

• meeting Roger Light for the first time, on the same day that Facebook mentioned their use of MQTT
• hearing Ken Boak talk about his Nanode project from London Hackspace (and here’s one I made later!)
• meeting Laura Czajkowski and hearing her talk about how to get involved in real world communities beyond IRC!
• seeing a fantastic community that had formed around some great people from two podcasts I greatly enjoy.
• a brief converation with Karen Sandler, the new lead of the GNOME Foundation.
• winning a ChipKit Max32 and a Canonical goodie bag in the raffle
• … and of course, watching Popey‘s demonstration of Extreme Ironing!

I hadn’t been to an event quite so specifically oriented towards freedom and Open Source for a while, and I’d forgotten how polarised some people can become around certain topics. In my career choices I’ve had to make some choices which make me a little more… shades of grey in my views about the technology landscape, so it is always good to have the challenging discussions and hear other views.

I’d definitely want to attend OggCamps in the future. A lot of fun, a great experience, and thanks to the organising team and sponsors. Recommended.

Even more talking

Following on from OggCamp, I was invited back to the UUPC Studio last week to cover for Alan – evidently I’ve not made too many slip-ups yet, since this is my third time as a guest presenter now. It’s really a fantastic experience and their production process and quality is always superb and well-planned and executed. Check out Episode 14 of Season 4 of UUPC “Revelations” to see how we got on with all the news, interviews, and listener feedback!

Related articles

• Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S04E13 – When Two Worlds Collide (podcast.ubuntu-uk.org)
• Alan Pope: Full Moon OggCamp (popey.com)
• Ronnie Tucker: Full Circle Podcast 24: OGGCamp Part Two (fullcirclemagazine.org)
• Ronnie Tucker: Full Circle Podcast 23: OGGCamp Part One (fullcirclemagazine.org)
• Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S04E14 – Revelations (podcast.ubuntu-uk.org)

Now, I may have aspirations to creativity myself, but the truth is that the artists and inventors who took (and deserved) an exhibition space at the Faire were all truly amazing people.

From Brighton Mini Maker Faire 2011

It was my intent to record a travelogue/podcast for Hacker Public Radio at the event, but as it happened, the background noise was not in my favour. I’ve shared a bunch of photos on Picasa[1] instead. They were all taken with a phone (albeit one with a pretty decent camera) so I’m sure better images and videos will emerge around the interwebs.

Aside: it must be about 10 years since I’ve been to Brighton, and although it was a fantastic day to be by the coast, as a driver I found the city to be maddening… although part of that definitely comes down to the accuracy of TomTom and other maps in navigating the one-way systems.

So… a Maker Faire. What’s one of those? well, basically, the concept is that of an event showcasing the creative talents of “Makers” – inventors and craftspeople, innovators:

Started in San Mateo, California in 2006, and now expanding to Detroit and New York, Maker Faire is the premier event for grassroots innovation. Held annually in each of these locations, the event may expand elsewhere in the future. Maker Faire is supported by MAKE Magazine and O’Reilly Media.

There was a big Maker Faire in Newcastle last year, but the Brighton “mini” event was certainly easier for me to get to!

Hopefully the photo gallery tells more of a story than I’m able to do justice to here, but I’ll summarise. It was a really fantastic day, and I’m glad I went. Some of my highlights and comments, in no order whatsoever:

• I love seeing families and kids interacting with technology, or making things – and getting really excited. It was a delight to hear Simon Willison tell me how he’d helped youngsters typing BBC BASIC into a BBC Micro debug their code (such memories… ah…) at The National Museum of Computing display. It was brilliant to see youngsters make music with water, or play with wool, make gingerbread houses, or make mosaics, or draw new monsters to be the “bosses” in a fantastic new computer game.
• Richard, whose surname I didn’t catch, who ran the “how the brain works” games on the top floor. Not only was he a brilliant and engaging entertainer/speaker, but he had about 20 of us at a time pretend to be ganglions in the brain and play out Pop Goes the Weasel – great fun.
• The gyroboard, one-wheeled, self-balancing skateboard, controlled with a Wii Nunchuck (video). Awesome. I want one, and I want mine to HOVER, DAMMIT!
• discovering new fun hacks – such as the Drawdio and the MiniStylophone that BUILD Brighton were showing and selling (yes… I had to acquire some stuff…)
• meeting friends old and new… in particular (!) @h4rrydog, @loudmouthman (complete with inspired daughter!), @natbat (sorry for talking shop at you (and for liking your product/company so much)), @simonw, @proactivepaul, @iamdanw, @monsonite, @folknology, @mikethebee, @dogsbodyorg, @jcrouchley (I need your stuff!), @TheArduinoGuy (great kit for Arduinos) and, for the first time in person since the Slorpedo triumph of Yahoo/BBC HackDay back in 2007, @jimpurbrick! It was far from a “usual crowd” collective though – great to see folks, looks like I missed a lot of people too, but it was very much a family and community event – I suspect the final numbers will be impressive.
• I should apologise both to the Sugru folks, and Ken and his team from London Hackspace on the Nanode stall, for evangelising their products for them to the people they were trying to talk to! I was not trying to get in the way, I just get excited by seeing these kinds of innovations… particularly knowing the backstories of the products, having tried them myself, and the fact that they are from the UK
• I definitely need to apologise to Zsófi from Flattr – she handed me an invite code, and I then went back to point out that the URL printed on her flyer was presenting a 404 code… I’m sure not the most welcome revelation of the day, but they did fix it, and I now have a Flattr profile.
• the sheer JOY, fun and enjoyment that was the real buzz of the event.

Thanks to everyone involved in making the Brighton Mini Maker Faire happen (and apologies that I didn’t discover it in time to volunteer to help) – the sponsors, exhibitors, volunteers, and staff at the Brighton Dome. I had a great time.

Final note: if you were there and you’ve posted coverage of the event, don’t forget to add a link to the Lanyrd page – it is open to anyone (well, those with Twitter accounts) and it helps to link all the content together

[1] Why Picasa all of a sudden, not Flickr? well, it is primarily down to the fact that I took all of the photos on my HTC Sensation today, and the Google+ app uploaded them automatically… making it fairly simple to create and share an album in Picasa. I’ve not posted about G+ here so far, but you may have noticed the link to my profile in the blog sidebar. I still far prefer Flickr, with all of the features and superior usability it offers, but in this case Google Photos/Picasa/Plus/Whatever just made it simpler.

Related articles

• Lava Lamp Music at Brighton Mini Maker Faire (mt-soft.com.ar)

Sketched couple

Originally uploaded by andyp uk

I’ve been playing around with digital sketching recently, given the number of touch devices I now use. This was something that I jotted on the Nintendo 3DS in Art Academy (available as DSiWare), based on the sculpture at St Pancras above the Eurostar terminal, which a friendly Flickr commenter reminds me is “The Meeting Place” by Paul Day.

After my rather poor previous scribble I am a lot happier with this one! I’m also excited to see how the Adonit Pro pen (a project I backed on Kickstarter recently) works out with my Android tablet, when it arrives… although I’m hearing that they may have some issues with Zagg screen protectors :-/

I have limited artistic talent for drawing, but I’m hoping to train myself a little more. Hints and tips welcome

Well, I’ll keep this short. As it says on the About page:

The Lost Outpost is Andy’s personal blog.

I also note in the disclaimer in the sidebar that:

The postings on this site are my own

As such, it would not make a whole lot of sense for my own blog, which is intended to be a place for me to post my personal thoughts and opinions, to carry guest postings from others. It’s not a community or group-maintained site – it’s the output of my brain, for better or worse!

So, thanks, but no thanks – I don’t take guest posts for this blog.

WebSphere doodle

Originally uploaded by andyp uk

Some random doodling I did on the Nintendo 3DS a little while ago. Yes, I have little artistic talent.

We had a fascinating, hour-long discussion on the topic, which has just been published as In Conversation With… David Berry and Andy Piper. A very enjoyable exploration of the subject, which touched on my own interests in history, society, social software, the augmented human, and the evolution of the ways in which we encounter technology.

I hope you find the discussion worth a read!

Folks from IBM and Eurotech may have jointly authored MQTT, but it has been published online with terms enabling royalty-free use and implementation of the protocol. The next stage is to put it forward for standardisation. Last Friday, the call for participation in a standards discussion was published on mqtt.org. It’s open to anyone to join, and given the excitement I’ve personally seen in the developer community, I’m hopeful that we’ll see plenty of interest.

Friday saw even more big news, from an entirely unexpected source. As I stood chatting to people arriving at the OggCamp party that evening, my Twitter alerts and email went crazy with MQTT chatter… Facebook announced that their new Facebook Messenger application (a result of their acquisition of the Beluga team earlier in the year) uses MQTT! I’d been aware of different mobile app developers using MQTT for a while now – in fact we recently highlighted what a great match the protocol is for Android applications, on the mqtt.org blog – but had not known about Facebook’s interest or usage. In their post talking about how Facebook Messenger works, they call out the characteristics that make it a strong protocol for a mobile group messaging application – low bandwidth, low overheads, low power cost… all of the things that have made MQTT successful in sensor networks and solutions, make it ideal for these kind of applications as well.

Well… as I said, a big week, with some exciting news. So it seemed only right that I should give a talk about MQTT and all of these latest developments at OggCamp this past weekend – the event which three years ago, resulted in Roger Light creating his mosquitto broker.

You may recognise the slides as a remix of the talk I gave at LinuxConf in January, but I’ve updated them to highlight the OggCamp dimension and to talk about the recent news. There will be more to come during the coming weeks, so join the chat in channel #mqtt on Freenode IRC, and keep an eye on mqtt.org!

mentoring
present participle of men·tor

Verb: To advise or train (someone).

If there’s one thing social technologies can teach us, I believe it is this: hierarchies are so 20th Century.

I came across the term “reverse mentoring” today – not the first time I’ve heard it, indeed I was invited to “reverse mentor” an executive myself at one time, but today… it got to me. Far from being an “exciting, unique program”, I think it’s an offensive way of describing knowledge sharing and relationships. It implies a polarity in the relationship, and more than that it emphasises the idea of seniority and implies a lower value in the therefore “junior” partner.

I tweeted about this earlier, and was challenged to clarify by @SuScatty:

@andypiper Out of interest, what would you rather it be called? Do you think the concept works, terminology aside?—
Suzanne Scatliffe (@SuScatty) August 12, 2011

So I went ahead and explained:

@SuScatty I don't know… How about… "mentoring"? Works fine. Why imply direction. Mentor / mentee terms do that.—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) August 12, 2011

Now, to be fair, the definitions of the words “mentor” and “mentee” typically do refer to age or organisational seniority. However, the key part is surely about sharing experience. Age can be discarded almost immediately – it’s perfectly possible and legitimate for one individual to be in a higher position than another in a company regardless of age.

Something I often discuss when I give talks about the transformational power of social tools in the enterprise is that, more and more, it is relationships and open sharing of knowledge that can build innovation and progress in a company. The classic “command and control” organisational structure we’re familiar with was invented by the factory owners of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and largely perfected in the early 20th Century by Henry Ford and his need to run an efficient production line. As companies grow, this kind of structure causes stratification to occur and silos to form, ossifying the way in which a company can operate. That’s one of the reasons why, at the turn of the 21st Century, some of the more innovative organisations like W.L.Gore, Google and Whole Foods have deliberately eschewed the traditional top-down model. For more on this, I strongly recommend Gary Hamel’s short (and unimpressive-looking, but actually very insightful), book The Future of Management.

Social software and tools can create flatter, more fluid organisational structures, deliver greater productivity and effectiveness, and importantly: build trust. In my own experience, it has done just that. I’ve got a formal management chain that I pay attention to from the perspective of overall direction, vision, and administrative tasks, but I have a heavily cross-functional, cross-divisional, cross-geographical network which enables me to contribute to and draw value from the wider business.

To pick on a couple of random folks in the IBM organisation, who I’m hoping (!) won’t object: by titles, Bob Sutor and Ed Brill are my “superiors”, but the facts are that I interact with them very evenly and freely across social networks, and I imagine that they might choose to seek my advice on topics that I might know more about than them if the need arose. Would I see that as “reverse mentoring”? Not really – it’s advice and support between colleagues, friends, or whatever the relationship might be. Knowledge sharing. I like to think that the exchanges of information between myself and those I provide mentoring to, and those I’m mentored by, are very much two-way – and that both sides benefit by finding support, new ways of thinking and filling out gaps in knowledge.

So back to this idea of “reverse mentoring”. Why isn’t it just about a relationship where a mentor – the one with the greater experience in or knowledge of a particular space – offers the benefit of that wisdom to a mentee? That’s just… mentoring, isn’t it? The other word is redundant – unless you are trying to reinforce that outdated organisational hierarchy you’re clinging to…?

BTW: Bob, Ed… of course, I do bow down to your superiority in all things!

Last words go to Su again:

@andypiper I don't think "Mentoring" would work, given that corporates like to use 5 words when 1 would do —
Suzanne Scatliffe (@SuScatty) August 12, 2011

Related articles

• 5 Reasons You’ll Benefit from Helping a Mentee (money.usnews.com)
• Peer to peer mentoring – expertise in your back pocket [Judith Germain] (ecademy.com)
• The Value of Mentoring (Extract from CEO Magazine Article, August, 2005) (pkmenon.wordpress.com)
• Are you a mentor? Do you wish you had a mentor? Would you like to become a mentor? [Ann Andrews CSP] (ecademy.com)
• Establishing a successful mentor/mentee relationship (budtoboss.wordpress.com)

Six years ago, of course, everything was different. We didn’t have an internal social network of the kind we have now (IBM Connections). We had rich user profiles within our corporate directory, we had an Intranet ID to login, and we had… well, we had a small pilot that someone had setup on our internal Technology Adoption Program (aka TAP), to see what would happen if individual IBMers were able to share their thoughts via blogs. That became known as BlogCentral, and progressed through four different versions over the next couple of years.

In the early days the community was small. There were no Blogging or Social Computing Guidelines, those were about to be developed, mostly by the small community that was in the process of forming; this was a little experiment. The experiment of posting what I was working on (a consultant in IBM Software Services for WebSphere at the time), the technical issues I was having, and any news or interesting links I’d found before the days of instant sharing via Twitter, led me to encounter and meet a huge variety of people. Good friendships formed – I got to know the amazing Roo Reynolds, Ian Hughes, Rob Smart, Kelly then-Drahzal-now-Smith, James Taylor, Martin Packer, Luis Suarez, Michael Martine, and so many others. I was invited to get involved in events, opportunities and projects that I would never have had the chance to even have known about before.

I found my voice in a crowd. I joined a tribe. I grew. I learned how powerful a network can be.

Today, IBM’s early experiments have borne fruit in a great variety of tools that we use day-to-day, and that we know can scale to support an organisation as diverse and large as IBM itself. We really do “walk the talk”. I’ve spoken about this journey often, of course, and I’m always happy to share my experiences and my story. And also – wow. That was just 6 years ago. The technology landscape has completely changed today, with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, and so many other places to share and collaborate. It’s mind-boggling that things have moved so quickly.

I’ll be honest: I’m not posting to my blog 3 or 4 times a day as I might have done in my youthful enthusiasm, in those days when all I had was an internal blog and Sametime to keep me going… these days I share my knowledge and connect with my network far more widely, and more often, outside of the firewall (because, honestly, there’s rarely much to hide). That doesn’t mean I don’t still respect the medium of blogs. They are the “rocks in the real-time stream”, as my friend Stowe Boyd once styled them.

I’m glad I’m still a blogger, both at work and outside of it.

Image credit: holeymoon on Flickr, via a Creative Commons license